11 Universal And Objective Truths About Making Friends

1. The easiest people to make friends with are the friends of your existing friends — both because your friends are unusually likely to share your taste in people, and because a pre-existing mutual is an extremely helpful shortcut to establishing trust.

2. As such, if you’re moving to a new place, you should just ask everyone you know whether they know anyone there you should meet. (Sometimes you won’t become friends with those people directly, but you will become friends with their friends, etc).

3. Also, when you’ve just moved to a new city, you have to say “yes” to everything. Even when you've just arrived and are not settled in yet, and even activities that aren’t exactly your jam — be a little overly-easy up front, and then later you can co-ordinate on doing the things you enjoy more.

4. The main dropped ball I personally see in terms of budding friendships is followup after the first meeting. You go to a party and you meet a friend-of-friend and you both vibe. Most people in my circles seem to make vague noises like “well I hope I see you around!”, or at best they ask for a number but never make a concrete bid to hang out. My guess is that the tipping point for Becoming Friends is probably seeing someone 3 times, so if you’re at 1 you gotta work hard to make the next 2 happen; after that it'll either happen naturally or no.
5. It's genuinely hard to differentiate sometimes between “person who does want to be friends but is somewhat disorganized and/or has a busy life” from “person who doesn’t want to be friends, really, but is awkward saying no.” I think you just have to swallow this risk somewhat: reach out 2 or 3 times (tops) over a few weeks or months, and if they can’t coordinate let it slide. Unfortunately there is no way to know for sure either way — I've had very good friends who I really thought were trying to politely reject me at first, but who were actually just extremely disorganized and/or flaky.
6. One helpful trick sometimes is to invite people to something last-minute that you’re pretty sure they can’t come to, so they hopefully won’t feel social pressure about saying “no” to it. Text them something like “hey I know it’s super last-minute but me and some friends are doing XYZ tonight, want to come?” If they actually can come: great. If they text back quickly and enthusiastically saying they can’t tonight but would love to [do whatever] in future, also great – they do want to be friends and genuinely can't make it. If they don’t reply till after the event, or if they just reply with a “sorry I have plans”, they probably aren’t looking to be friends, though again you can never really be certain.

7. This one is up to you but I really think if possible you should travel to the other person the first couple of times (unless they very enthusiastically decide to travel to you). Just make it as easy as possible for the other person to say “yes” — go to where they live, or to the activity they like, as a catalyst for the friendship, then later you can get things on an even footing. (The second part is important too, nobody likes a doormat, truly).

8. From what I remember of high school chemistry, a lot of reactions require a certain amount of "activation energy" for the two components to combine, but once they've melded you need much less energy to keep them together. A lot of my previous tips could be re-written as: don't get into a relationship that requires unreasonable amounts of your energy to maintain, but do be willing to provide most-or-all of the activation energy for a friendship to start. My sense is that many friendships don't get going because neither party (nor lucky outside circumstances) successfully provide the needed activation energy, even though both parties would have enjoyed the friendship once it started.
9. As with throwing parties: when making friends, really try to be at ease around the other person, even at the cost of other priorities. I know it might sound like I’m screaming RELAX! COME ON, RELAX ALREADY! at you, but I truly think “being at ease and putting others at ease” is an important and surprisingly actionable skill. E.g. if you’re anxious about someone else’s experience you might be tempted to keep asking “are you having a good time? Are you cold? Are you hot? Am I being annoying? I’m being annoying, I know it, tell me.” But this does not put people at ease, so instead you gotta just breathe in and out (or whatever your personal method is of deescalating your feelings) and prioritize being at ease over fixing the (possible) problem. Similarly if you’re thinking “oh wow I’m so boring I have nothing to say”, remember that being at ease is more important than being interesting, so don’t stress the interesting-ness if it puts you ill-at-ease. Etc etc etc for other doubts and worries.
10. The Propinquity Effect – "the tendency for people to form friendships or romantic relationships with those whom they encounter often" – is one of the last social psychology results I actually believe in. In the old days people became friends by running into each other in the neighbourhood a few times, but we don’t live in that world any more so you have to do the same thing digitally. Send people some texts occasionally, even if it’s a dumb meme or an unnecessary question or a thing that made you think of them. (I am not great at doing this, if I'm honest, but I think it’s a great thing to do). Again, don’t overdo it and if they never text you first/back then you gotta let it go, etc, but first you gotta try a bit. (Or, you know, join a club or activity where you'll see the same people multiple times, that works too).
11. I still think small groupchats are an underrated social technology, and that if e.g. you hang out with 3 people, it’s nice to make a little groupchat of those 3 people and send them a photo of the evening (or whatever) so that in future if you go to something you can send a text to that group and have those people feel like they’re part of a (mildly) cohesive unit. I get endlessly made fun of for making too many groupchats, and I know some people do truly find it annoying, but frankly the benefits outweigh the costs so I keep doing it anyway.

I made a game, it's a great way to make friends. If you like Charades, Taboo or Monikers you might enjoy it.